Think of the cold Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, or the monk who tries to eliminate all humor in The Name of the Rose, or the frowning Koran burners of Florida. Holier-than-thou people usually end up holier than nobody.
The incarnation has become resurrection in you.
The Holy Spirit is God desiring in you and through you – until it becomes your desiring too.
We each have our inner program for happiness, our plans by which we can be secure, esteemed, and in control, and are blissfully unaware that these cannot work for us for the long haul – without our becoming more and more control freaks ourselves. Something has to break our primary addiction, which is to our own power and our false programs for happiness.
We must keep eating and drinking the Mystery, until one day it dawns on us, in an undefended moment, “My God, I really am what I eat! I also am the Body of Christ.
For the man on the quest, the universe becomes enchanting-an effect that good religion accomplishes. There are no dead ends, no wasted time, no useless characters or meaningless happenings. All has meaning, and God is in all things waiting to speak and to bless. Everything belongs once a man is on his real quest and asking the right questions.
Knowing without loving is frankly dangerous for the soul and for society. You’ll critique most everything you encounter and even have the hubris to call this mode of reflexive cynicism “thinking.
No doubt you’re aware that many traditional Christians today consider the concept of universal anything – including salvation – heresy. Many do not even like the United Nations. And many Catholics and Orthodox Christians use the lines of ethnicity to determine who’s in and who’s out. I find these convictions quite strange for a religion that believes that “one God created all things.
All theologies are blasphemous in so far as they attempt to reduce God to something that can be known through the understanding by which we know other things.
To have a spiritual life is to recognize early on that there is always a similarity and coherence between the seer and the seen, the seekers and what they are capable of finding. You will seek only what you have partially already discovered and seen within yourself as desirable. Spiritual cognition is invariably re-cognition.
We mend and renew the world by strengthening inside ourselves what we seek outside ourselves, and not by demanding it of others or trying to force it on others.
Mystery is not something that you cannot understand, but it is something that is endlessly understandable! It is multilayered and pregnant with meaning and never totally admits to closure or resolution.
Surely God does not exist so that we can think correctly about Him – or Her. Amazingly and wonderfully, like all good parents, God desires instead the flourishing of what God created and what God loves – us ourselves. Ironically, we flourish more by learning from our mistakes and changing than by a straight course that teaches us nothing.
I would ask you to consider the crucifix as a homeopathic image, like those medicines that give you just enough of the disease so you could develop a resistance and be healed from it. The cross dramatically reveals the problem of ignorant killing, to inoculate us against doing the same thing.
Too often, we have substituted the messenger for the message. As a result, we spent a great deal of time worshiping the messenger and trying to get other people to do the same. Too often this obsession became a pious substitute for actually following what he taught – and he did ask us several times to follow him, and never once to worship him.
For many secular people today we live in a disenchanted universe without meaning, purpose, or direction. We are aware only of what it is not. Seldom do we enjoy what it is. Probably it is only healthy religion that is prepared to answer that question. Healthy religion is an enthusiasm about what is, not an anger about what isn’t.
Deep communion and dear compassion is formed much more by shared pain than by shared pleasure.
All creation is groaning in one great act of giving birth. – ROMANS 8:22 I still have many things to say to you, but they would be too much for you now. – JOHN 16:12.
Only love effects true inner transformation, not duress, guilt, shunning, or social pressure.
Your image of God creates you. Your image of God creates you. Your image of God creates you.
It is the egoic illusion of our own perfect rightness that often allows us to crucify others.